


The Knights of Winter

by dreadwulf



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, I'm so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-22
Updated: 2017-09-22
Packaged: 2019-01-03 23:56:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12157428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadwulf/pseuds/dreadwulf
Summary: The knights of summer fall like leaves before the winter, but the knights of winter will not live to see the spring. After the last battle, Jaime and Brienne say goodbye.





	The Knights of Winter

**Author's Note:**

> I put my death scenarios in short pieces so I'm not tempted to put them in my long ones. So this one is unbeta'ed. Let's handwave the details on this one, as far as where they are and how they got there. Doesn't matter. There was a War for the Dawn and a last desperate mission, and we find our heroes in the aftermath. Gratuitous sadness ahoy.

Brienne kneels over her fallen knight on a stony floor glistening with black ice, her laboring breaths clouding the freezing air between them. She rips her gauntlets off carelessly, her helmet already tossed aside. Her white-blonde hair is streaked red and her eyes are wide and frightened. With shaky hands she pulls the helm from him, revealing his golden hair and beard caked in blood, and lets it drop to one side.

He manages to smile for her – more of a grimace really. He would make a joke if he could. In his hand he still clutches Widow’s Wail glimmering with the eerie blue blood of the Night’s King. Brienne’s sword she’s left buried in the smouldering remains, just to be sure.

She keeps her eyes on his face, trying not to see the dark curtain of blackish blood where his belly is slit open, where her hands even now work to keep it all in. “Jaime, Jaime look at me.”

An unnecessary request. He too seems uninterested in his wound; he looks only at her. His eyes fixed to her face. “You think we’ve done it?” he asks hoarsely.

Her hands press against the rising tide of blood swelling from his abdomen, making him wince. “I know we’ve done it.”

“He could rise again.”

“He won’t.” Her tone will brook no disagreement. “Our two swords, Ice and wildfire together. We cut him to pieces. Exactly as Sam told us. And then I burnt the rest.”

“Yes, that’s right. I was a mite distracted.” He laughs weakly. He had been impaled on the Night King’s blade by the time Brienne finished it.

“Stop talking,” she snaps at him, fumbling with what’s left of his chestpiece. “If you’re capable.”

“Think I have to. Like it or no.” Every few words he has to suck in another breath, fighting to get enough air.

She pulls the armor off him in pieces. Watching him fighting for breath, Brienne lurches to her feet suddenly and seizes him under each arm. With a hurried apology, she drags him his body’s length over to the stone wall, and sets him propped against it. The groan he lets out echoes through the cavern, and his face twists with pain. But he breathes easier sitting up.

“There now,” she says with tenderness uncommon to her, touching his face. “Better?”

Jaime grins. “My hero.” His arms hang limply at his sides now, though his fingers still curl around his sword. He watches her arranging him. He knows the time is short, his life is draining away.

“I hope,” she says brusquely, “that Jon was right about the White Walkers falling with the Night’s King. Otherwise that was a costly victory.”

Their other companions had fallen along the way; they two are the only ones left of the band of ten that set out beyond the New Wall.

“You’ll know soon enough,” he insists. “When you go back.”

Brienne keeps working, stuffing any cloth she can find against his gaping wound, attempting to bind it. “There is no going back. The way is closed.”

“They’ll open it again, for you. For Brienne the Blue.”

“With twenty miles between here and there, and a thousand wights? They were raising the barrier behind us. There isn’t time.”

“Don’t wait for me then. Go now. I’ll be gone soon enough.”

“Jaime.”

“Don’t wait until after.”

“There is no after.” She chokes on the words, and for a few breaths her head drops below his line of sight. When she raises it again her expression is determined, and a tear glistens along her cheek. “And anyway I won’t leave you here alone,” she finishes.

Brienne has done what she can for his wound, and works now to make him comfortable. Slides her leather bracer behind his head, her fur cape and his discarded armor behind his back to prop him up. He tells her to stop fussing over him, and they both smile weakly, because he likes that, being fussed over, he’s always liked that. Sweat and tears glow on her pale face.  

There’s only one torch left burning now, and its glow is beginning to flicker. The unnatural ice all around them glimmers horribly in its light. If you squint enough, staring up from the floor, it almost looks like starlight on the speckled ceiling. But not quite.

She slides down to lie alongside him, her long legs pressed against his. It is a meager source of warmth but he seeks it hungrily, clutching at her with his good hand anywhere he can reach. Keeping her close just a little longer.

“We knew this journey would go one way only,” she says.

“Brienne, you have to go back. You have to live. What’s the point of saving the bloody world without the only person I care about in it?” He sputters at her, outraged. “I take it all back. Bring back the Night’s King, fuck the world. You and I should have rowed a boat across the Narrow Sea, taken up as soldiers for hire. We could have had good years together.  We could have battled and fucked all our days together until it all ended. Why should they all live and we die?”

“Lannister to the end,” she says tenderly, and lays her head on his shoulder. “Still lying. I’m not the only person you care about.”

“The others are dead.”

“Some still live. Tyrion still lives.”

He snorts. “Tyrion can go fuck himself.”

“He can now. He will live.” She closes her eyes against the world. “You still love him.”

He surrenders. “All right. One person can live. And all the wine and women he can find. ”

“Your friend Adaam Marbrand.”

“I suppose he can live too, when the Spring comes. And Podrick for you.”

She smiles into his neck. “Ser Pod. And Sansa Stark. Just as we promised.”

“Your father, Lord Selwyn. Though he won’t thank us for it, without you…”

“Bran,” she suggests faintly, after a pause.

He accepts the idea quickly. “May he outlive all the rest. Arya too, if the little murderer hasn’t gotten herself killed yet.”

“Ser Bronn.”

“Bronn of the fucking Blackwater. He’ll finally get his castle. Probably _my_ bloody castle.”

“Sam Tarly, and Gilly, and their little boy.”

“Whoever cooked that last meal at Winterfell, the roast with the blood pudding?” He evades her elbow. “I’m serious. I appreciated that. A world worth saving needs a good cook.”

Brienne sounds more and more distant and dreamy, exhaustion finally overtaking her. “Lyanna Mormont.”

“The little bear. And gods help whoever marries her.”

“Tarth and Casterly Rock, and all who live there. And the Riverlands…”

“But I wanted you to live, my lady. I wanted...” Grief overtakes him. He doesn’t mind dying, truly he doesn’t, if he knows she will go on. A world without Brienne hardly seems worthwhile. “You must go back to the Starks. They need you.”

“They won’t now,” she says stubbornly, stroking his beard. He can see only the top of her head. But from her voice alone he can tell she is starting to relent. “I would go to tell them the story. Tell them what we did.”

He is growing too tired to tell her what he thinks of that. He doesn't much care what they say of him after he's gone. But if she returns they will greet Brienne as the hero she truly is, and that matters. “Yes, go. Tell them.” He strokes her hair with his trembling hand, and musters all the energy he has left to emphasize. “Go back to Tarth, be the Evenstar. Don’t let them knight you. You’ve given enough. Go back to your island and live. Marry, if you wish it. Make giant babies.”

Brienne chokes on her words, and presses her hand against her lips to suppress a sob.

“Go back. Do this for me. Swear it.”

She looks up at him, and her eyes shine defiantly. Fierce, watery blue. So beautiful he can’t stand it. He glares back at them with every ounce of strength he can muster. This is their last fight, and he is determined to win. He must.

She blinks first, dropping her gaze. “I would have had your children if I could,” she says in a voice uncharacteristically small and delicate. “I would have loved that.”

Now his vision clouds over with tears. “You must fight fair with me, Brienne. I’m a dying man.”

It should be suspicious how quickly she relents – he should worry, but when she sets her chin with that familiar resolute expression he has to believe everything she says.

“I will go back. I swear it.”

Relieved, Jaime finally relaxes, and the pain recedes. “Go now,” he murmurs, a little reluctantly.

“Soon.” She lays her head against his shoulder again, and her arm draped across him curls around to stroke his chin tenderly. “Let me rest first.”

“I thought I was the lazy one.” His voice grows fainter, farther away.

“We’ll be parted soon enough,” she says firmly. “But not forever.”

“You’re not going where I’m going. Even if we went together,“ he rasped. “None of the seven hells would take you.”

“There are no heavens for me without you in them.” She turns his face to hers and kisses his lips, then kisses them again. “I’ll find you, wherever you go. The Stranger himself can’t keep you from me.”

He pictures an angry Brienne riding from one hell to another looking for him and shouting down anything that got in her way. “I love you,” he tells her. He should have told her so many more times. A hundred, a thousand.

She curls herself around him, touching every part of herself to him, and whispers it back. She says it over and over, as if to make up for all the lost time. _I love you. I love you. I love you._

He is still for a long time before Brienne truly believes that he is gone. She keeps touching him, hoping to keep him with her by sheer force of will. She prays to all of the Seven in turn to hold him here with her, just a little longer.

Finally, gulping for air between sobs, Brienne sits up fully. She grasps at her thigh where the armor is broken and bloody and pulls out a long shard of ice, unnaturally solid and sharp. The blood gushes out behind it and she tosses it aside. Then she lies back down with her head in his lap, taking his hand In both of hers.

This final oath she cannot keep. Brienne couldn’t bring herself to tell Jaime that her leg is entirely numb, and she cannot walk. The wound in her thigh pulses with her heartbeat. By now the blood loss is making her dizzy and weak, and she would not have been able to cover it much longer. Surely to lie to a dying man must be a mortal sin, but the gods will understand. Even if they didn’t, for what measure of peace she could grant him in the end, she would pay any price.

“I’m so sorry, Jaime,” she says through her tears, even though he can’t hear her now. If she stops talking to him, she will be desperately, horribly alone. She will talk until she can’t anymore. “I shouldn’t have lied. But I wouldn’t have left you even if I could. I promised that I would be by your side to the end, and I meant it. No more goodbyes. Nothing will come between us, not ever again.”

She closes her eyes and holds on to his hand, and feels herself growing heavier and warmer.

“We were the knights of Winter after all, not Summer. The war ends and we do too. I wish there had been more time for us. But I’m not sorry, not for anything. It was worth every moment. We didn’t get very long, but it was so sweet, my love. I would not trade these last years for a longer life. It was worth it, all of it, worth it.”

The black ice glimmers around them, as Brienne falls quiet and the last torch slowly goes out. This ice has slowly covered the North in its entirety, but now it will advance no further, and will never cover the two knights. Within hours the sun will return, for the first time in months, and the ice will begin to melt. They will be found like this, the songs will say, untouched by ice or fire. When the first rangings ride out, when the snows have melted and the Night’s Watch resumes their duty, they will find them there together. The last knights of winter, waiting hand-in-hand for the sun to rise.

Now, her last quest completed, Brienne of Tarth lies in the arms of the man she loves and gradually drifts away, dreaming of Spring.


End file.
